You're still missing the point. That code does contain reference to JNI: at some point in order to get that unsafe code to execute you need to load it as native code in exactly the same way as you would do if it were in a separate file. Try to obfuscate that as much as you like by claiming that there's some magical difference in that code based on where it comes from, but at the end of the day you are using JNI, and you do have explicit reference to that fact in the Java code.
So, what you have is that code that does completely harmless things--a little bit of file I/O--all of a sudden executes code that manipulates memory unsafely.
No, the bit of code that does 'a little bit of file I/O' is completely safe. It's the bit of code that loads an external native library that's unsafe, and that's still not Java code that you're loading. You're just using Java as a glorified loader for your unsafe C/C++/assembler code. Which is all very well if that's what you want to do, but it still doesn't make Java capable of the misbehaviour you'd like it to be.
No, the code isn't pure Java. As soon as you load that.so file you're not running pure Java any more, and it's that non-Java library that 'does something impure'. Makes no difference where that file comes from - a standard filesystem or an array of bytes defined in a Java file, it isn't Java code.
Um. Welcome to last week - 1.51 and 1.52 already do this, and I believe they're already mandatory for some of the latest Japanese releases, though I could be wrong on that.
I'm not sure that matters any more - I understand that OEM versions of Windows XP now come with several of the more popular viruses and spyware packages pre-installed to save you time and bandwidth.
No need to worry. Because of the ongoing war against Iran it will be necessary for him to stay on for a third term. America needs continuity, and anyone who says otherwise supports the terrorists.
Bingo. Although all of the examples I gave other than the MGS2 cutscenes were in-game, and the MGS2 in-game graphics are still more impressive than the FFVIII dance demo (which is available online if you search a bit, for those people who are having difficulty distinguishing in their memory between the PS2 tech demo and the PSX FMV).
Sorry, but that's patently untrue. Everyone seems to forget just how bad the PS2 tech demos were - all of them were surpassed in games within the life of the system. Compare the cutscene-style demos (RR girl, Final Fantasy dance sequence) to something like the real-time cutscenes in MGS2. The Tekken demo to any of the Tekken games on the system (even Tekken Tag Tournament outclassed it). The GT demo was probably one of the most impressive, though it cheated quite a lot to achieve that, and it still doesn't look as good as the GT games did when they actually came out.
The old man's head demo is probably the hardest to match up, for the simple reason that there aren't many games where the entire power of the system goes into rendering a single face. But for equally impressive looking facial details, Silent Hill 3 is the traditional example...
Not a console game, but there's a fairly enjoyable card game called Fantasy Business in which you wheel and deal in traditional fantasy items (buy healing potions low, sell them high sort of thing...)
Absolutely. It's sickening how the console market continues to succeed while being mired in the mindset of yet-another-racing-game and yet-another-fighting-game, while PC gaming is largely ignored despite its innovation with titles like yet-another-FPS and yet-another-RTS.
I came across this article a week ago at another place, and was quite annoyed by it there. Here's what I said:
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
I blame the developers formerly known as Square for this.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
Even worse - with so many SPEs, they're even making 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster...' comments redundant. And because it has two Cells, two sets of RAM etc, they've made snide remarks about dupes redunant too.
The only consolation is that with this new processor, Dragonball Z 'Perfect Cell' jokes will never get old.
You're getting picky about a typo ('costumers' for 'customers') and you don't check your own post before submitting ('people who ake their competitor's clothes')?
People who live in grass houses shouldn't throw stones, you know.
a) I find the Firefox UI far better than the suite one. Don't confuse your opinion (subjective) with fact (objective).
b) Now you can download individual tools that do one thing and do it well rather than a monolithic suite. This is a good thing. Or perhaps you think it would be even better if the Mozilla Suite also incorporated image editing, word processing, database and videogaming functionality...
c) Um. Your point C is the same as B.
Conclusion: people who liked the suite more will be saddened by this, and some of them will start crying about how it's the end of the world and Microsoft has won, and the Mozilla Foundation is evil. People who liked the individual components more will probably see it as a good thing, since it's likely to result in more focus on their preferred setup.
Slashdot Mirror
You're still missing the point. That code does contain reference to JNI: at some point in order to get that unsafe code to execute you need to load it as native code in exactly the same way as you would do if it were in a separate file. Try to obfuscate that as much as you like by claiming that there's some magical difference in that code based on where it comes from, but at the end of the day you are using JNI, and you do have explicit reference to that fact in the Java code.
Um. That only requires you to remember twelve numbers:
Then you can just recite all the digits in numerical order. Might get a bit boring after a while, though.
No, the bit of code that does 'a little bit of file I/O' is completely safe. It's the bit of code that loads an external native library that's unsafe, and that's still not Java code that you're loading. You're just using Java as a glorified loader for your unsafe C/C++/assembler code. Which is all very well if that's what you want to do, but it still doesn't make Java capable of the misbehaviour you'd like it to be.
No, the code isn't pure Java. As soon as you load that .so file you're not running pure Java any more, and it's that non-Java library that 'does something impure'. Makes no difference where that file comes from - a standard filesystem or an array of bytes defined in a Java file, it isn't Java code.
Perhaps you'd care to explain how that's 'pure Java' any more?
Um. Welcome to last week - 1.51 and 1.52 already do this, and I believe they're already mandatory for some of the latest Japanese releases, though I could be wrong on that.
I'm not sure that matters any more - I understand that OEM versions of Windows XP now come with several of the more popular viruses and spyware packages pre-installed to save you time and bandwidth.
Six months later? I think you're underestimating the efficiency of Microsoft Windows...
No. WINE is not an emulator, Cell is not an x86 chip.
No need to worry. Because of the ongoing war against Iran it will be necessary for him to stay on for a third term. America needs continuity, and anyone who says otherwise supports the terrorists.
Bingo. Although all of the examples I gave other than the MGS2 cutscenes were in-game, and the MGS2 in-game graphics are still more impressive than the FFVIII dance demo (which is available online if you search a bit, for those people who are having difficulty distinguishing in their memory between the PS2 tech demo and the PSX FMV).
Sorry, but that's patently untrue. Everyone seems to forget just how bad the PS2 tech demos were - all of them were surpassed in games within the life of the system. Compare the cutscene-style demos (RR girl, Final Fantasy dance sequence) to something like the real-time cutscenes in MGS2. The Tekken demo to any of the Tekken games on the system (even Tekken Tag Tournament outclassed it). The GT demo was probably one of the most impressive, though it cheated quite a lot to achieve that, and it still doesn't look as good as the GT games did when they actually came out.
The old man's head demo is probably the hardest to match up, for the simple reason that there aren't many games where the entire power of the system goes into rendering a single face. But for equally impressive looking facial details, Silent Hill 3 is the traditional example...
Not a console game, but there's a fairly enjoyable card game called Fantasy Business in which you wheel and deal in traditional fantasy items (buy healing potions low, sell them high sort of thing...)
Absolutely. It's sickening how the console market continues to succeed while being mired in the mindset of yet-another-racing-game and yet-another-fighting-game, while PC gaming is largely ignored despite its innovation with titles like yet-another-FPS and yet-another-RTS.
No, hang on a second...
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
4. Nipples?
Even worse - with so many SPEs, they're even making 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster...' comments redundant. And because it has two Cells, two sets of RAM etc, they've made snide remarks about dupes redunant too.
The only consolation is that with this new processor, Dragonball Z 'Perfect Cell' jokes will never get old.
Oh, wait...
Um. The GS wasn't the PS2's CPU - it was its GPU. The CPU was the 'Emotion Engine'.
Finally I can play all my old Gameboy games on a portable device.
No, hang on a second...
WINE Is Not an Emulator.
You'll need to use QEMU instead.
It may not have Edinburgh Waverly station, but it does have Edinburgh Waverley Station. Is that close enough for you?
But I do have genuine moral, philosophical opposition to the poll, you insensitive clod.
I know not reading the article before commenting is a Slashdot tradition, but it's getting a bit much when the submitter clearly hasn't read it.
You're getting picky about a typo ('costumers' for 'customers') and you don't check your own post before submitting ('people who ake their competitor's clothes')?
People who live in grass houses shouldn't throw stones, you know.
The proponents of making Java open-source are just extremely confident.
a) I find the Firefox UI far better than the suite one. Don't confuse your opinion (subjective) with fact (objective).
b) Now you can download individual tools that do one thing and do it well rather than a monolithic suite. This is a good thing. Or perhaps you think it would be even better if the Mozilla Suite also incorporated image editing, word processing, database and videogaming functionality...
c) Um. Your point C is the same as B.
Conclusion: people who liked the suite more will be saddened by this, and some of them will start crying about how it's the end of the world and Microsoft has won, and the Mozilla Foundation is evil. People who liked the individual components more will probably see it as a good thing, since it's likely to result in more focus on their preferred setup.